Facing East 776 Street, the living room is connected to the dining room by an ovoid cut-our, either side of which hang a pair of c1840 New York State mirrors. These in turn are flanked by brass jardinière pedestals topped with purple Minton urns designed by Christopher Dresser, which were bought in a shop in Greenwich Village. The sofas came from the Freeman family home in Haverhill, Massachusetts. while the mirror-top cable is a William Pahlmann piece. The Chinese Deco carpet was purchased at Sotheby's - immediately after the auction, while that particular lot was still unrolled on the saleroom floor, Roy Yeager was to be heard instructing unsuccessful rival bidders not to walk on it at any cost - The World of Interiors
The thumbnail image on Jigsaw Planet caught my eye. When I finished the puzzle I asked Google about it and found this much bigger image. I wouldn't want a room like this, but it is lovely.
P.S. The person who posted this image on Jigsaw Planet has over a thousand interior images posted.
Good looking room. Decorilla agrees. My wife remodeled the main floor of our house. She's in the process of decorating it. It looks pretty nice, too nice even, I'm afraid to go up there, afraid I'll spoil the ambiance.
MODCONS - Modern Conveniences. Real Estate jargon. I've got a microwave oven I use for basically all my 'cooking'. The only thing I really cook in it is scrambled eggs - 2 eggs, a splash on milk, whip with a fork for a minute and then 2 minutes in the microwave. If I put in a bit too much milk the bottom of the eggs is still wet, which is better than when I put in too little and the egg gets cooked all the way through but sticks to the bowl, and cooked egg is the devil to get off. Scotch Brite scrubber and elbow grease does the trick. I keep thinking I should get some anti-stick spray or something but it hasn't happened yet.
Anyway, the timer that runs the microwave oven. If you want to heat something for 2 minutes, simply shut the door and press 2. If you want less than a minute, or anytime that is not exact number of minutes, you need to press TIME, and then the digits of the number of seconds (and minutes) you want, like 3, 0 and then you press START. If you really want the oven to be a modern convenience it should have something like a 5X or 10x button. Press the 10x button and 3 and you get 30 seconds. To do minutes and seconds maybe a + (Plus) button. Press +, the number of minutes, then press 10x and a number and off you go. Of course it adds two more buttons to the control panel, but there are already a bunch of buttons on there I don't use so they could go away. Until I need them.
I had to go and open my big fat mouth. Four days ago I put up a post about Emergency Generators and this morning I woke up to no power. It only lasted a few hours and it's back on now. I may not need an emergency generator, but I definitely need more flashlights, you hear me, Amazon? Very annoying not having any power, totally disrupted my morning routine - no coffee, no microwave, no internet. Fortunately the sun was high enough that if I picked my spot, there was enough light to read my book (Last Argument of Kings). Got through a couple of chapters.
Some places you might need electrical power to heat your house. You would need it if you have electric heat. Some places in Oregon still use electric heat. Even if you heat your house with ever reliable gas or oil, you still need electric power to run the pumps and fans. We can get by without electric power as we have two gas fireplaces. If it gets really cold we might have to huddle up in front of the fireplace, but that's okay because there's a TV there and that's where we spend a couple of hours a day anyway.
Picked this glass up out the cupboard and I heard this funny 'tink' sound. Looked at it and noticed two cracks that start and the rim and run down the sides about two inches.There is one front and center in this picture. I hope you can see the little jag to the right about a quarter of an inch below the top of the beer in this photo. The jag is only about an eigth of an inch long and marks the end of the crack. So far.
Broken Glass Closeup
I went ahead and poured my beer into the glass because I wanted to see if it was going to leak. I fully expected it to do so, but it didn't. I'm probably going to tempt fate and use it again for my second beer but after that it's going in the trash. It's fine to play with broken glass when you know you're doing (What? You're drunk, throw that glass away now.) but I suspect it won't survive another visit to the dishwasher and there's no sense risking it, not for a $2 glass anyway.
Turning the knob on the faucet in the back yard. I've got a sprinkler going on a tree that's got some kind of problem, and maybe a little extra water will help. Anyway, I've got the faucet dialed in to where the water is going far enough but it isn't going too far. Now I look at the knob so I can remember what position it is in, so tomorrow when I come out here again I'll know how much to turn the knob and I won't have to fiddle-fart around with it. So I look at the knob and I see that there is all kinds of stuff in the center. There's the rusty nut and the shaft it is threaded onto. Behind the knob there is a little round aluminum plate with some writing on it. But nothing stands out, and there is noting fixed to mark it against, so I'll just have to remember to turn it 7/8 of half of a turn, which is like turning the knob so the bump that is currently at the top is half way between where the bump at the bottom is now and the bump just to the left. If you look at the knob as a compass and say north is at the top, then we want to be pointing to southwest by south. If the knob had six bumps we could look at it like a clock face, but it has eight bumps, not six, so we won't.
For sprinkling the tree, 7/16 of a turn is probably good enough, but if it was a more sensitive operation, like tuning in a radio or turning the feed screw on a lathe, you're going to want something better. Radios and machine tools have dials calibrated to whatever accuracy you like*. You could get around dials for high precision equipment by gearing down the dial to the point where it was one complete turn for every hash mark on the direct drive dial. That way you don't have to look at the dial, you just count the number of turns of the dial / crank / knob.
*the phrase 'you like' is kind of loaded. If what you like is commonly available, it's no big deal, but if you want something out of the ordinary, you can have it, you just have to pay for it, and custom stuff is expensive because you not only need someone who can do the work, you also need someone who is willing. Most people are looking for steady work. It's the unusual person who will take on custom jobs. Now you could say that building contractors are always doing custom work, but their options are limited to the materials they are familiar working with.
A month or three ago we started decompressing the basement and expanding back into the main floor of the house. We had a remodeling project going on last year and while that was going on we were living in the basement. Usually I have place to myself, but we were both living in there for the duration of the remodeling project. Plus we had all the furniture. It was a little congested. My workbench suffered the most. Anyway, things are getting back to normal and I thought I would move the coffee maker and the hot pot onto a table in the big room. That worked okay until somebody tried to print something using the laser printer that was plugged into the same outlet and a breaker tripped. Laser printers draw 15 amps! Who knew? Certainly not me. Actually it was a bad arrangement overall. The coffee maker and the hot pot each draw about 15 amps. The coffee maker and the laser printer probably only draw that much for a few seconds, so you could probably get away with running both of them on the same circuit as the odds would be low that they would both want big power at the same time. You might even get away with it until you have completely forgotten about this whole power arbitrage thing. So, to keep the peace among my minions I moved the coffee maker back into the work room and the hot pot into the kitchen. The coffee maker displaced the battery chargers, so they got sent out to the big room.
There are still some problems with the current arrangement. The laser printer is still on the same circuit as the air fryer oven, but we seldom use it. I guess there was a time when we were using it regularly, but it's been months since it's been turned on. The hot pot died and has been replaced by an always hot pot. I suspect it is on the same circuit as the microwave but no problems. So far.
Then the new hot pot died. No, wait, it's working. No it's not, it quit again. What gives? The outlet is bogus. Maybe the prongs on the new plug are thinner, or something with fat prongs was in here before. In any case it's not a solid connection. So I replaced the outlet, 77 cents from Home Depot, and all is well. Except, while I was trying to sort out how many circuits I had, I discovered that the outlet under the sink is busted - no power at all. So now, since I'm getting all electricicated, I am going investigate.
Did ROMEX Cable Change Again? (NM-B Update)
Backyard Maine
I found the problem in the switch box. Presumably the outlet under the sink is for the disposal that was never installed because we only use the basement for drinking beer, nothing serious like actual food. The switch is for the never-installed disposal. What I found in the switch box was three Romex cables. One would be power and one would go to the outlet box. The third? Well, hell, every electrical box in the world seems to have two or three extra Romex cables that often have nothing to do with whatever the box is for. But the wires in this one aren't connected to anything, they are just taped over.
Check the hot lead and it's got 15 volts. Check taped leads, and whoa! This one is hot! Talked to Jack at lunch today and he suspects that the 15 volts was induced by running next to a live wire. 15 volts, but no oomph behind it. So I decided to just tape it off and leave it.
Electricians earn their money. Stuffing those wires back into the box takes some oomph, and trying to contort myself so I could reinstall the outlet under the sink was a struggle.
I bought this hot pot right around a year ago for $20. We used the heck out of it for a year and then one day last week it just quit working. Not bad for $20. Still, I thought I would take a look and see if it could be fixed. It did quit working shortly after I got it, but there was a screw loose in the base, I tightened it up and it worked fine, until last week.
Anyway, I attempt to open it up, but it doesn't want to cooperate. I end up having to rip the handle off in order to expose the heating element. I don't see anything wrong, other than the rat trap that shuts it off won't stay set. That's okay, it has served us well, and it was only $20.
But I'm looking at the pile of parts and I realize there must be over a hundred individual pieces that go into this thing, which leads me to wonder how in the world could somebody make this thing and make a profit doing so? Individually they are $20 from Amazon which means the factory in China can't be getting more than $10. They must have some finely tuned assembly lines along with workers who are getting paid a quarter for every pot they assemble. Probably takes them two minutes, so they might be making $50 a day, which might be good wages in China, I dunno.
This bathhouse makes $$ heating its pools with Bitcoin mining
Morning Brew
Crypto currency is stupid. After transportation, it is one of the biggest energy consumers on the planet. Maybe. Bitcoin miners and their like suck up a ton of electricity and turn it into heat. It's stupid, but it makes money.
However, if you have electric heat, a Bitcoin heater can make some money that can be used to offset your electric bill, which would be nice.
PGE (Portland General Electric not Pacific Gas & Electric,which operates in California) just raised their rates. My last electric bill was for $150. Last time I checked it was like a buck and a half, so I ain't happy.
Curious that East Germany was able to produce this glass. It seems like the extra processing would have increased the cost, something a cash strapped country would want to avoid. So either the extra processing didn't cost that much, or the party decided it needed to be done regardless of the cost. Seems like bars and restaurants would be ideal customers, as long as it didn't cost too awful much, and they weren't contractually obligated to buy their glassware from the local Mafia don's brother in law.
My wife wanted a new chair for home office since I stole her last one, so went to Costco and picked up this luxo model. $200, but it's a La-Z-Boy.
My old office chair
The last office chair I had I bought from Amazon for a like a hunnerd bucks and it lasted a year before it started falling apart. The support piston lost its gas and then the foam in the armrest collapsed, hence the towel and bungee cord. When the remodeling project started this summer, her home office disappeared so I replaced my chair with her old one.
Death of a Chair
We'd been home for a couple of hours and I was sitting in my chair happily sorting old screws when the leg on my old office chair gave out and dumped me on the floor. Can't really complain though, the chair is like 25 years old. I think we got it at Office Depot. Looks like we need another chair.
So back to Costco we go and we pick up a gaming chair for me. The La-Z-Boy chair has folding armrests which is nice if you need to be close to your desk, but they don't fold all the way back, though I don't know if that is a real issue or if it just looks funny. The DPS Chair doesn't have folding armrests, but when I sit in it, the armrests are low enough that they will go under my work table.
P. S. June 2025. Both of these new chairs have a major flaw. The seat cushion sags in the center, so it kind of forces you to slump. I slump enough on my own, I don't need any help, thank you. I finally folded up an towel and set it in the center of the Centurion Gaming Chair. It helps.
I replaced our garbage disposal a while back (10 years? 20 years?) and it was great, for a bit, and then it developed a ticking noise. Tried this, tried that, but the noise persisted. Now we are remodeling the kitchen so I have a chance to take a look inside this thing and get to the root of the problem. The model I have (Space Saver P2) has plastic sound insulator surrounding the disposal. It's held together with three screws, but they are at the bottom of a deep well and I cannot make out just what kind of heads they have, not that it makes any difference because none of the screwdrivers from my brand new set will reach to the bottom of the hole, mostly because the side of the handle runs into the side of the case. Fine, pull out the drill and enlarge the hole, it's just plastic. Drill goes in, but it doesn't help. Fine, I have a very long drill bit, not as big in diameter, but maybe we can drill through those screw heads. Aha! We can, easily, and the sound cover comes off. Now I try to remove the rest of the screw, but the drill, being as it is turning clockwise, the same direction as the threads on the screws, has driven them all the way in and they do not want to come out. I manage to unscrew one by using needle-nose Visegrips, but the plastic stand offs holding the other two break off. Whatever, the cover is off and now we can get down to business.
The screws holding the body of the disposal together are as advertised in the video - inverted Torx. I don't have any tools that will fit those, but I do have a set of small six point sockets and for this job they work just fine. Pull out the screws, remove the top half of the housing and what do I find. Nada. There's a bunch of little teeth sticking out that look like the have been getting whacked, but I can't find anything that could be whacking them. Put the cover back on, turn it on, and it spins and hums like new, no more ticking. I do not understand what happened. I do not understand what could have been making the noise. Maybe when I clean up later I will find the culprit and the cause of all this irritation will be revealed.
Meanwhile I am debating whether to try and reinstall the sound cover. I would need some very long screws and nuts, or maybe some zip ties. I'm not sure how much good that cover does. Right now I'm tempted to just toss it.
I have a big, inflatable cushion that sits on the patio table and supports the cover - keeps the cover from becoming a lake. Took the cover off last spring and deflated the cushion, fully intending to clean it off, fold it up and put it away. None of that happened, so it just sat there all summer, draped over the side table. You don't suppose the surgeries and the remodeling project had anything to do with that, do you?
Anyway, it's fall and it's time to cover the table and chairs again, but where's the inflator? We've had a couple of these things. We had a sleeper sofa that had an inflatable mattress, and the kids bought an inflatable bed, but where are the inflators? Turns out Osmany had them. He brought them over. One is a regular, 110VAC powered one, but the other was a battery powered one that was purchased for camping. The battery powered one was broken. Score! A little project for me.
I needed a long Phillips screwdriver to take the screws out, but it seems my long Phillips has crawled off into the weeds, so I ordered a cheap new set from Amazon. Curious thing is the tip on the #1 driver was too pointy to engage with what looked like #1 screws. The #2 driver worked fine, probably because it was extra pointy as well.
When the screws came out, the grooves on the screw were filled with red plastic from the housing. It looked like the holes were all stripped. I cleaned the plastic off of the screws. It was surprisingly difficult. Trying to get it out using my fingernails didn't work, I had to use my knife and roll the screws along the edge of the table. When I put the screws back in they tightened up just fine. I suppose this is just a feature of self-tapping screws.
Mystery Circuit Interrupter
Check the wiring inside the case and it quickly becomes obvious that the tiny little circuit board in the middle of the charging line is preventing the charge from charging the battery. Take that out, splice the wire with solder and electrical tape because I can't find my box of electrical do-dads, charge it overnight and we're right as rain.
I initially figured the battery was dead, so I thought about ordering one ($17 from Amazon), but then I'd have to get rid of the old one. Then I realized there is a battery shop not too far away that would be happy to sell me a new battery and take the old one off of my hands, but they'd probably want $40 for the battery and this stupid blower I am working on only costs $25. Not hardly worth it.
P. S. The magnetic tips on the screwdrivers aren't very strong either. Pretty sad really.
But what the heck is a D2 VMH GB DUALIT TOASTER? Google-the-all-knowing knows, hence the above picture. Hand made in the UK with a hand made price, but if you use the code ZOMBIES, JC Penny will knock $30 off the price. Wait a minute, J C Penny is still in business? I thought they collapsed. Is this a Zombie company? Wikipedia knows, sort of. They have a long page in which the word "bankrupt" appears 24 times. Typical retail business in America for the last 50 years, up, down, bought, sold, shuffled and sorted. Hard to tell if there is anything in the current business related to the original, though they seem to still have a retail store at Washington Square, the local big-deal mall.
I made this over the last couple days. The criteria, besides holding cd changer and books, was that it be as cheap as possible. I do that so if i hate it or it's stupid i have no problem disposing of it. Also i wanted it as light as possible, so the carcase is made of 1x2 furring. One sheet of 1/4 plywood plus 2 scraps of 1/2 ply for the large shelves. All glued. Weighs about 20 lbs.
I'm not quite sure I understand what I am seeing here. An electric stove that also burns wood? Why? Because electrical power was unreliable back in 1937? Or maybe the price of firewood was volatile, so when it was cheap you burned wood, but when the price jumped up because - who knows, the wood cutters union went on strike, or they got drunk, or whatever, you switched to electricity. Or maybe it was when you were in the money and you could pay the electric bill, you used electricity, but when you were out of work and the power company shut off your power, you could still cut your own wood and cook dinner. I dunno, it's just the strangest thing I have seen in a while.
50 years ago Jody & I stopped at the Tree Frog commune, or what was left of it, in northern New Mexico. A friend of mine from Ohio, one John R. Montgomery, black sheep of the Montgomery Lumber Company in Newark, used to live there. Mentioning his name to the couple living there got us a rustic cabin to sleep in. They had a wood burning stove in their cabin and the woman claimed she could boil water in ten minutes starting with a cold stove.
The man was making a living making silver jewelry. I remember seeing him at work one morning filing a silver button over the foam lid of an egg carton. (Were egg cartons even made of foam back then?) The lid was to catch the bits of silver that were being filed off of the button. Strangest thing I had ever seen, up till then.
He had had a heart attack. He was probably only 30 years old but he looked like he weighed 300 pounds. The doctor put him on a 1200 Calorie-a-day diet. There was no running water, but there was an irrigation ditch maybe four feet across full of a flowing stream of ice cold water, if you wanted a bath. Mine was brief. Bear Mountain was nearby. We tried climbing it but when we got to around 10,000 feet I ran out of air.
While I am talking about old times, IAman asked the hostess an Banning's Pies yesterday for the non-smoking section which got a chuckle out her since smoking hasn't been allowed in restaurants in Oregon since 1999. I knew it happened a few years ago, but 20 years? Boy, time sure flies.
[The in-laws] may be moving in, so we wanted to section off an area downstairs to give them some privacy. First I was thinking "wall," then "partial wall maybe 6' high..." Then I said "heck, no one's gonna be down there anyway, let's just curtain it off."
Made some big curtains out of Home Depot canvas tarps, and metal conduit for curtain rod. Got these little curtain rod rings with alligator clips that you just clip to the hem of the canvas. Dirt cheap and has a decent muslin look to it.
I was actually at Restoration Hardware HQ a few weeks ago, and their lobbies are full of stuff that looks like this -- though priced in the the thousands. I'll pass my curtains off as Belgian linen.
I wonder if this is how Hong Kong got started. 'Yeah, we've got some extra room, you can stay will us' and then it just kept going. We've got a couple of the kids staying with us, but 99% of the time I am not even aware they are here.
My daughter wanted to curtain off part of the big downstairs room for her wedding reception. I never understood that. Did she think people were going to steal some books? Or sit in the chairs? Yeah, there's some things about being social that I just don't understand.
During WWI Parisians were worried that their city might come under German bombardment or air attack. Shop owners and businesses, to minimize the danger of shattered glass, taped their windows. While the taping started out utilitarian, eventually the taping deigns became more elaborate and artistic.
I'm a great believer in tape. I recently got fed up with not having any tape (evidently I had used up every kind of tape I had on hand, except Scotch tape), so I dialed up Amazon and ordered a bunch. I ordered packs of electrical, package, masking, duck and gaffers tape. I got too much of some, like electrical tape and packing tape, but when one roll costs $4 and ten rolls costs $8, you can see how that happened. I only got one roll of gaffer's tape because the stuff is expensive. It's supposed to better than duck / duct tape cause it doesn't leave any adhesive residue on the surface when it's pulled off, but I haven't had a chance to try it.
A couple of days ago: Strong Fall Storm Brings Heavy Snow, Strong Winds to Rockies, High Plains. Huh, maybe winter really is coming. Then these two generators showed up on my desk. With the way state governments have been mishandling energy supplies (I'm looking at you, Texas and Michigan), I suspect many people are buying generators.
Going by the numbers, the Firman generator from Costco looks like a better deal. It produces almost four times the power as the Predator from Harbor Freight for less than twice the price. The Predator is smaller and lighter than the Firman, but it's still weighs 50 pounds, which isn't 'light'. I mean you could carry it, but I wouldn't want to have to carry it very far. The Firman weighs 200 pounds and even with wheels, shifting it around is going to take some oomph.
And then there's the noise factor. The Predator noise level is rated at 66 dB, the Firman at 72 dB. Sounds like they ought to be fairly quiet, but I really have no idea. I know 100 dB is really loud. I suspect it really depends on your situation.
The Firman will run on natural gas which is great if you are going to be using it for an extended period - you won't have to constantly refilling the gas tank. On the other hand, making a connection to a natural gas outlet requires a certain amount of technical competence, not much mind you, but some people just can't be bothered. I expect we'll get a few fires and maybe an explosion or two, but they probably won't kill as many people as carbon monoxide poisoning caused by people running the dang things indoors.
Uniberp bought a Predator a couple of years ago and uses it occasionally.
The boys brought some Buoy Beer over the other day. The label is a separate piece wrapped around the can and stuck on with adhesive. I have never seen this before. All beer cans I am familiar with, the labels are printed directly on the can. The beer is lager, not one of those wretched ales.
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